Lottery ticket ends up damaged in the garbage bin
By Kate Northrop
DILLWYN, Va. — A Virginia woman had a moment of panic when she almost lost out on a $110,000 Cash 5 jackpot, but she was thankfully able to recover the winning ticket she tossed in the garbage.
Mary Elliot was nearly beside herself when she realized she threw out a winning Cash 5 lottery ticket worth $110,000, so she went digging through the trash to find it.
While the Buckingham County resident was able to successfully recover it, she had run into a new problem: a damaged ticket.
Covered in coffee stains, the ticket's barcode would not scan when she tried to verify it.
Yet, the ticket still held the winning numbers for the Virginia Lottery's Cash 5 drawing on Feb. 24, which were 6, 13, 18, 21, and 25, so she took it to the Lottery's Prize Zone West in Henrico.
There, the Lottery said officials were able to confirm her win and award her the $110,000 prize she rightfully won.
"When I saw I'd won, I couldn't stop shaking to save my life!" she told the Lottery.
Elliot had bought the winning ticket at the Food Lion on Constitution Route in Dillwyn. The numbers she chose were based on important birthdays.
The odds of winning a Cash 5 jackpot are 1 in 749,398 at $1 per play. The current Cash 5 jackpot stands at $160,000 for tonight's drawing at 11:00 pm EST.
(Click to display full-size in gallery)
Congratulations!!
Wow seems like there's no shortage of careless lottery players throwing live tickets in the trash.
As it turns out... One woman's trash is that same woman's treasure.
Congrats!
She sure lucky the ticket wasn't extremely damaged, just an unreadable bar code and skid marks they still cashed it for her.
Congrats to her, glad she figured it out in time.
* Mary Elliot was nearly beside herself, but then....
The barcode may not scan, but they can manually enter the number... (every barcode has a number under the barcode)
Glad her ticket was verified. In a lot of cases, it is not really carelessness. Sometimes one has 50 higher priorities and simply busy with life.
.. the one thing not to do when getting it out of smelly trash is to wash and iron the ticket I suppose ..
"Pay my stinking ticket!" ... Sry, fell on a diaper ...
Thankfully the lottery headquarters did not give her a hard time about the condition of the ticket. Good thing she remembered it before trash pick-up day. That would have been a nightmare.
Great story...
I'm happy she found that ticket.
LOL At least she didn't use it to line the Bird cage.
I remember a Man saying he saw an alert on his local News Station claiming that a Multi Million dollar ticket for Powerball was still unclaimed and was about to expire. The numbers were something like, 1,5,22,26,30, with a Powerball of 8. He thought,"What idiot doesn't claim their Multi Million dollar ticket very soon after winning?" He realized in horror that he had bought those exact numbers almost 6 months ago and had seen that ticket just a couple of days prior but had foolishly thrown out that winning ticket. He made a mad dash to his garbage can and dug through the trash to retrieve the winning ticket and got it and was able to turn it in and collect his Multi Million dollar prize and thanked his lucky stars. 😀
WOW they should make a film about that one!